Just yesterday I discovered that Peter is now publishing his own work at the DAM Bookshop. I purchased a copy of his new Multimedia e-book, Organizing Your Photos with Lightroom 5 and am very impressed. I’m very interested in the Multimedia approach he uses since this is what I’ve done with my e-book Photography For Real Estate. Peter has gone much farther with multimedia than I did, he has 7 hours of video that go with the book. This is a great multimedia book for both beginning photographers and experienced professionals. For those that haven’t figured it out already, organizing your photos is a major challenge and the sooner you get it under control the easier the job will be. Peter’s approach is very systematic!

I think the big benefit of multimedia books like Peter’s is that they are more like a class. Some people learn better from the audio/visual approach while others learn better with a text book approach. Multimedia provides everything. Peter has inspired me to take my books farther in this direction.

I’ve become an affiliate for Peter’s bookstore so all you readers can get a 10% discount on everything at Peter’s bookstore (except The DAM Book, 2nd edition and products Peter does not publish) by using the check out code: aff-pfre-10-nx.

I offer yet another testament to the need to get one’s house in order, soonest. For years, I had kept my own ‘archive’ in My Documents and included as part of my backup routine. I ran into a couple of the basic issues Peter discussed in his book, which I finally bought and dug into over the holidays.

While I did not find the raw growth of my backups to be as big an issue as Peter suggests, I did have significant problems with -confidence- in my backups. For instance, after creating a mirror backup, checking properties they rarely matched 100%. There’d be an extra file somewhere, or the data mass would be off by a few 100 KB. Negligible, but yet they should have been exact.

The other problem I had run into over the years came from migrating through different software packages. For instance, PS Elements would support PNG and PDF, but Lightroom didn’t (PNG, now though). I ended up having about 20GB of ‘lost’ content mixed in with the rest of my ‘archive.’

In migrating to a version of Peter’s methodology, I’ve elminated all these problems. The archive’s 100% clean now (and only ‘one’ archive, to boot). Unmanaged content’s been removed from the archive. And, best part, when I do a backup, everything matches down to the byte.

Rather than gross negligence, a lot of the issues I describe (and that you may have) are simply ‘legacy’ that built up over time. I’m happier with the health and security of my archive than I have ever been.

But, what drove me to this, now? As my photography business started growing, and my archives started representing real economic value, the old approach was rapidly becoming unmanageable. Now, I have a solid, scaleable solution, that I have -confidence- in.

I have the Multi Catalog Workflow book by Peter, it is an excellent book that goes into depth about how to use multiple catalogs and multiple computers with the same catalog etc.. I have one catalog that has images spread across multiple drives that I would like to migrate to a single RAID and be able to make sure that all the LR data goes with it. I think this latest book is probably the one that I need.

As JT points out the amount of potentially unwanted data that keeps getting “backed up,” migrating from archive to archive can be significant and being able to manage that through LR is very important. I don’t really like the idea of having to use LR for this task but as the catalogs get bigger its probably the best way to manage it.

There’s a significant cost, in terms of time, associated with just the management of all this data.

Not sure how to make suggestions here, but I think something that goes with digital asset management is what kind of hardware people use for secure backup? What are the different levels of RAID? What are the differences between network attached storage and direct attachment? You can have the best software strategy but if your hardware fails, or vise versa, you could be hosed.

Of the areas we might be tempted to take shortcuts, its probably a bad idea to be penny wise and pound foolish with DAM.

If anyone already has this book could you let me know if it covers how to consolidate an already existing catalog spread across multiple drives onto a single RAID?